Cancer has become the leading cause of death in Taiwan for a long time, and thus diagnosis, therapy and pursuance of cancer are extremely important to nationals' health and lives. Cancer therapy mainly depends on surgical therapy, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. Surgical therapy usually is made by cutting off cancer cells or cancer tissues as well as the surrounding normal tissues and lymphs and administrating with radiation therapy or chemotherapy according to the cancer properties so as to avoid cancer recurrence. However, chemotherapeutic drugs and high-energy radiation also destroy normal cells and tissues and generate side effects.
Furthermore, cancer therapy drugs can be grouped as cytotoxic therapy, hormonal therapy, targeted therapy and cancer support therapy. Drugs for cancer support therapy are used to reduce the derived side effects. Drugs for cytotoxic therapy on cancer cells can include cytotoxic therapy, hormonal therapy and targeted therapy. The aforementioned chemotherapeutic drugs are involved in these three therapies.
Drugs for cytotoxicity on cancer cells include alkylating agents, antimetabolites, microtubule stimulants (e.g. Paclitaxel), microtubule inhibitors (e.g. vinca alkaloid), cytotoxic antibiotics and DNA topoisomerase inhibitors, etc. Types of hormonal therapy drugs include hormone antagonists and hormone agonists for influencing hormone functions, or aromatase inhibitors for influencing hormone metabolism. Types of targeted therapy drugs include angiogenesis inhibitors, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitors, immunotherapy agents, apoptosis agonists, and so on. Each of the aforementioned anticancer drugs has a specific effect but also generates side effects. Therefore, searching for novel anticancer drugs remains an R&D issue to scientists.
In the past, molecules containing a disulfide moiety play a vital role in chemistry and biochemistry. For instance, Shinkai et al. (2000) published that various disulfides were synthesized to show inhibition effects on cholesteryl ester transfer protein in human sera. Peterson et al. suggested that the condensation reaction was made on hydrazide and aldehyde carrying sulfhydryl group to synthesize molecules containing sulfur-sulfur bond and the molecule has biological activities such as anticancer and so on (Peterson et al., 2009.). In addition, oxidation of thiols was made using halide and hydrogen peroxide to generate disulfide molecule (Ali and McDermott, 2002; Karami et al., 2005).
It is therefore attempted by the applicant to deal with the above situation encountered in the prior art.